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Inmates create art out of limited supplies, but it's also contraband

By Marino Eccher, St. Paul Pioneer Press

Posted:
10/26/2013 03:48:55 PM MDT

It's a masterpiece in toothpaste and toilet paper: Jesus hanging from the cross, sculpted in sharp detail from his gaunt ribcage to the nails in his hands to the inscription proclaiming God's love for the world.

The display case is a plastic evidence bag. The venue is Minnesota's Dakota County Jail. The artist was an inmate, by now long gone.

Like almost everything prisoners craft surreptitiously in their cells, the footlong sculpture was taken away as contraband. But jail officials held onto it as a reminder of the creativity that can flourish even in the most restricted environments.

"It's incredible," said Loren Hanson, the jail's programming director, "what they can do with this stuff."

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Some items forged over the years are functional: A deck of cards and set of dice made of paper-based pulp, and an array of picture frames made from intricately folded potato-chip bags.

Others have a more artistic flourish, like the sculpture of Jesus or a set of classical comedy and tragedy masks.

All are fashioned from whatever odd materials inmates can get their hands on in the course of a very controlled day: candy wrappers, soap shavings, toilet paper mashed together with toothpaste to make it stick together. One inmate used the lining of his jail-issued tennis shoe to make a cribbage board.

Chess pieces made from paper, toothpicks and toothpaste are among the artwork created over the years by inmates at the Dakota County Jail Wednesday October 23, 2013. (Pioneer Press/Jean Pieri)

"It's limited to what they have contact with," said Dakota County Sheriff Dave Bellows.

And all are technically forbidden. In a place where even pencils are tightly controlled and a paper clip can become a lock pick in the wrong hands, jail officials don't want to risk harmless projects that pave the way for more sinister creations.

"Things like this aren't going to hurt anybody, but what else are they making?" Bellows said.

Still, he said he admires the work even as he confiscates it.

"There's a lot of talent back there," he said. "The level of artistic talent is really amazing."

He also recognizes the side benefits of crafting: hours spent painstakingly making a sculpture, Bellows said, are hours not spent getting into trouble.

Picture frames made from wrappers are among the artwork created over the years by inmates at the Dakota County Jail Wednesday October 23, 2013. (Pioneer Press/Jean Pieri)

Josh Page, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota who's done research on the criminal justice system, said makeshift crafts are part of "a really rich history of improvisation in penal institutions" - from weapons to jury-rigged coffee heaters.

The skill is especially useful in jails, he said, which often lack amenities or stores that sell recreational items to stave off boredom. It's up to inmates to fill the gaps.

"The biggest thing, particularly in jails, is finding something to do," Page said.

Page, who used to teach junior-college classes at San Quentin State Prison near San Francisco, said inmates might also turn to artistic projects because it's "something meaningful they can do with their time."

That was Ed Mead's experience. An ex-convict who spent 18 years in state and federal prisons for a clash with police during a bank robbery, Mead, 71, now runs an online store where inmates can sell arts and crafts they make while incarcerated.

He said the act of creation gives inmates something they can be proud of.

Many items Mead sells through his site, prisonart.org, are traditional drawings and paintings. Some are made in prison shops. Others are in makeshift mediums: a dragon sculpture with the scales made from cardboard cracker boxes, a guitar made of Popsicle sticks.

The Dakota County Jail has no shop or arts room - Bellows said there isn't space or money. But the jail sometimes puts on programs to give inmates exposure to the arts.

Barry Kleiber, a Minneapolis artist, has led two such programs in recent years, teaching art lessons. The classes culminated in personal graphic novels and a mural on a jail wall.

Kleiber got involved at the jail after he heard from a colleague about another mural in the jail gym, made by inmates in 2009. It shows the Minneapolis and St. Paul skylines, along with messages of hope, freedom and redemption.

The programs are funded by grants from the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, a publicly funded nonprofit.

Some work they produced was rudimentary. Some of it, Kleiber said, was "shockingly good" - from striking scenes of crime to a detailed painting of flowers with the message "I love you mom" written on the back.

The themes on the mural ranged from a tornado representing an inmate's anger problems to a demonic hand beckoning with temptations of drugs and violence to an inmate looking in the mirror and seeing a man in a graduation cap and gown looking back.

"We think of felons as really hardened," Kleiber said. "I've never met a group of guys who were more willing to say, 'I have some problems.' They could catalog for you everything they'd done wrong. My job was to say, 'What have you done right?' "

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